The last nine days
have seen wide releases for two sports-themed movies about tough coaches
forging champions.

Both films follow the usual sports-movie formulas, at
least to a point, and both deal in various ways with larger issues, including
striving to rise above mean circumstances and facing life-and-death issues.
Both are ultimately message films, though they have vastly different messages —
and, while one wears its positive message on its sleeve from the opening
minutes, the other turns on an insidious third-act twist that’s been carefully
kept out of a well-orchestrated media campaign.

Coach Carter is based on the real-life story of Ken Carter, an
uncompromising high-school basketball coach at a tough urban school who
requires more from his players than great basketball. He insists that they sign
contracts requiring them to attend classes, sit in the front row and maintain a C-plus grade point average or better — and is
willing to lock the gym and forfeit games if they fall behind in their classes.

Carter, played by Samuel L.
Jackson, hands down the baddest tough coach in
sports-movie history. He also
demands something more intangible: that his players respect themselves, one
another and him. He addresses them as “sir,” and insists on the same honorific
for himself. (When one player objects, “I’m not a sir,” Carter shoots back:
“Are you a madam?”) He sets high standards, and unsurprisingly the players
respond by willingly doing whatever it takes to meet them.

There are no big surprises in Coach Carter, a straightforward inspirational-coach sports story in
the vein of Hoosiers, Remember the Titans and Miracle. Million Dollar Baby, on the other hand, turns on a plot twist that,
while clearly telegraphed in the film, morphs into a sympathetic depiction of
one of the major pillars in the culture of death.

Actually, the culture of death raises its head in Coach Carter too. The story includes a
subplot in which a player’s pregnant girlfriend decides to abort her baby while
she and the father are estranged. The story presents this decision without
comment or judgment, neither affirming nor condemning it; it’s simply part of
the harsh world in which these teens live, which also includes drug dealing,
freak dancing, street violence and so forth.

In Million
Dollar Baby, by contrast, the life issue is no subplot, but is at the heart
of the climactic conflict — and the film isn’t neutral. Baby tells the fictional story of Frankie (director Clint
Eastwood), an aging boxing coach who doesn’t work with girls but is eventually
won over by Maggie (Hilary Swank), a determined young
woman with trailer-park roots who quickly becomes a contender known for her
opening-round knockouts. (Readers who don’t want to know more should stop
reading now.)

During an exhibition bout with a notorious dirty
fighter, Maggie takes a cheap shot after the bell, breaks her neck on the stool
that Frankie has already placed in the ring, and is left paralyzed for life. By
the film’s end, Maggie persuades Frankie to disconnect her ventilator and end
her life.

As depicted in the film, there is really no way to
regard this act but murder. Frankie doesn’t just disconnect Maggie’s ventilator
(which in at least some circumstances might be a licit form of allowing a
person to die); he gives her a triple overdose of adrenaline, which is
unambiguously murder.

Some have called this “assisted suicide,” though
Frankie doesn’t just “assist.” He does the whole job. It’s not really “suicide”
at all. In fact, as if the whole business weren’t disturbing enough, on the
evening Frankie kills Maggie he simply slips into her hospital room, makes no
attempt to assess her state of mind (she’s been sedated to prevent her from
biting her own tongue) and simply puts her down.

Frankie is
Catholic — a daily communicant, in fact — and he agonizes over this decision
for some time, even taking the problem to his priest, Father Horvak (Brian O’Byrne) at St. Mark’s Church, whom he has a
habit of pestering for explanations of such mysteries as the Trinity and the
Immaculate Conception. In the past the priest has impatiently brushed aside
Frankie’s questions with perhaps less caution and theological nuance than
pastoral insight, rightly sensing that Frankie’s questions are really a dodge
of some sort. What Frankie needs is not catechism classes but to make peace
with God.

This time, though, the priest
takes Frankie seriously, warning him that whatever sins or offenses haunt him
now are nothing compared to what he’s contemplating, and that — questions of
God and the afterlife aside — ”if you do this, you’ll be lost somewhere so deep
you’ll never find yourself again.”

The priest’s advice at least converges with Church
teaching, though he makes some mistakes and fails to explain the gravity of
this sin. His focus is entirely on Frankie, not Maggie; he only says that he mustn’t do this, not that she mustn’t be killed in this way, or
why. He’s not an unsympathetic figure, but he has no deeper answers. One
gathers from him that the priests aren’t bad guys, but they only know how to
mouth the party line. They can’t really explain why, and have no solutions.

What makes all this especially regrettable is that
Swank and Eastwood are doing such good work, and in spite of its offensive
finale Million Dollar Baby is an
engaging film that even well-formed Catholics, despite their reservations,
might care about. Coach Carter is
definitely rougher around the edges, but it just might inspire some young
viewers to think about improving their lives, as opposed to ending somebody
else’s.

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